I’m getting married next February so weddings and marriage have been on my mind lately. I’ve found that while I’m very happy to be celebrating and 
giving public acknowledgement to my relationship with my partner, I am very ambivalent about becoming ‘the bride’.
Ariel Meadow Stallings, in her wedding memoir, Offbeat Bride, nicely sums up the feeling:
For me, the scariest part of getting engaged was feeling as if I were suddenly buying into an identity that wasn’t my own. I was having a bridentity crisis.
The concept of ‘the bride’ has always had negative connotations for me. I think this partly comes from my mother – she never did the big white wedding thing herself and getting married has never been seen as the pinnacle of achievement in my family. Also, being someone who tries to stay out of the spotlight, being cast as the bride (a ‘look at me’ type role) is very confronting!
I’ve also found that the bride conjured up in popular culture and by the wedding industry is supposed to behave in particular ways and have a ’my life is perfect and complete because I’m getting married’ attitude. The ‘bridezilla’ stereotype is the most extreme example of this: the perfect wedding day must be realised – at all costs. I don’t identify with this ‘bride’ at all and I like to think that I’ve got lots more to achieve post-marriage and not just on the domestic front.
I’m not sure that there are many women who really relate to this bridal stereotype (although I do know of at least one real-life bridezilla!) but the myth perpetuates even if it’s just seen as something to conform to or react against. I think there’s a reason books like Offbeat Bride and websites like Indiebride exist, many women just don’t conform to the traditional notion of the bride but still want to get married and have a lovely wedding day.
Weddings are such highly symbolic events, it’s an interesting process to decide which symbols you want to retain and which to leave behind – engagement rings, white dresses, being given away, bouquet tosses and changing one’s name – so that you end up with a wedding that’s reflective of you and your partner as a couple.
(On the topic of deciding whether to change one’s name see my dear friend Legal Eagle’s recent post on the subject as well as earlier posts by Kerryn and Emily posting on What We Said.)
7 Comments
September 10, 2007 at 8:13 am
I don’t think you could ever be a bridezilla, my dear Miss V.
I had a friend who had her wedding planned in first year uni. She didn’t have a partner at that time, but that didn’t matter. When she actually married (some 10 years later) she was bitterly disappointed, because it didn’t match up to her very high expectations.
On the contrary, I’d never really expected to get married at all – and I’d certainly never dreamed of a white wedding or anything like that. My mother didn’t have a white wedding either, nor did her sister. The only person in my family who did have the “big white wedding” was my dad’s sister, and that ended in divorce, so I think big white weddings had bad connotations for me.
I was delighted to receive a proposal, however. And my wedding day was one of the best days of my life, partially because friends and family put in so much effort into making it special, and partially because my main aim was not to have a “perfect wedding” but to have lots of FUN!
The funny thing for me was how enthusiastic my mother got about it all. She loved planning it all, which was great because I would probably have left it all to the last minute or something.
September 10, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Thanks LE. I’ve been very surprised at how excited my mother is also. She’s also the last-minute type however – so I’m not leaving the planning details to her!
September 12, 2007 at 11:38 am
I resisted becoming the bride as much as I could. I hadn’t expected to marry and even seriously considered marrying overseas, quietly and without fuss. But I wanted my mother there. So, instead, we had a small ceremony and even smaller dinner afterwards. And I organised it all in under three months.
And I don’t regret that I didn’t indulge in the stereotypical trappings of a Wedding — no white dress, no cake, no bouquet tossing, no reception for every man, woman and child I’d ever met. Everyone who came was relaxed and had fun and I have the clearest memories of a day that was exactly as D and I wanted.
One of my sisters became that bride and had that wedding. It was high pressure, high conformity and, in my memory, all rather fuzzy and one of the least enjoyable weddings I have attended. I’m still in two minds as to whether she was a bridezilla but apparently I was the bridesmaid from h*ll because I refused to buy the shoes she picked out (like they would have fitted me) or the material for the dress (as it was I spent more on that dress than on my wedding dress). I used her wedding as a model for what I didn’t want mine to be.
As models go, it was perfect.
Life doesn’t end with the wedding nor does it begin. Your wedding is simply a milestone in your life and, as such, should reflect what you and your partner want and value so you can look back on it and smile. Have fun planning!
September 12, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Make it what you want it to be Miss V our wedding was in a cow paddock by a little stream and we did it all our selves. The crux of the matter is standing up in front of those you care about and publicly declaring your intention to make a life with your significant other. All else is just ritual (which can be fun)
)
Congrats by the way
September 12, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I wasn’t bridezilla but I did have the typical wedding, not because I wanted it but because my mother did. I don’t regret it – it’s the choice I made at the time and it was a great day, but I wouldn’t necessarily repeat it. Bride is word that carries a heavy burden, but as long as you are true to yourself, and true to your fiancee, you will be just fine.
September 13, 2007 at 3:37 am
Weddings (like babies) are one of those events that bring out the expectations and opinions of everyone around you – whether you want it or not. Our approach to getting married was to try and break down the elements of the wedding celebration and actually being married (the marriage bit that comes after the wedding seems to get forgotten by a lot of bridezillas!). We boiled it down to 3 three things that we thought a wedding represents – a legal contract, a religious blessing and an emotional and personal commitment. We decided the first two were irrelevant for us since we were not religious and didn’t feel we needed a piece of paper to strengthen our bond. But we still wanted to have a celebration of the personal commitment we were making to each other – that is after all the most important thing. I believe that for 2 people to stay together, it is the emotional bond you have that will do it, not a “contract” and not a blessing by God. We stood in front of our family and friends and made a commitment to each other – in a sense they were “our God” witnessing our vows and themselves promising to help us and hold us to our promises. As for the wedding itself, our approach was to examine each element and decide whether we wanted it as part of our commitment celebration – there had to be more reason than just tradition (in my mind, that’s just like saying, everyone else does it so we should too). I’m not saying we didn’t have traditional aspects to the day – I wore a white dress (not a meringue and no veil!) and we said vows (written ourselves) and exchanged rings. I even had bridesmaids, mostly because I liked the fact that I could say “you 3 girls are very important to me and I want to recognise the support and friendship you’ve given me”. But we got married on a beach and instead of signing a register, we had all our guests sign as witnesses (to name a few examples). Most of all we wanted cut out all the crap that can make weddings so boring and impersonal and have a party! A relative of mine who acted as our “unqualified celebrant” said something really lovely to our guests which captured what we were trying to achieve – he said that because we had considered in such detail what we wanted to have in our wedding and what we didn’t (and in particular in writing our vows) it took on so much more meaning because we had really thought about what it meant to be making this commitment to each other and to be married. For us that was important to not just be “repeating after me” vows written by someone else. The result was that we had the most amazing, memorable and meaningful ceremony, not to mention an incredibly fun party! Of course, there’s more to the story, like resistance from parents, but maybe I’ll blog about that soon…
Good luck with your plans, it sounds like you have thought a lot about the meaning of weddings and getting married – I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic day!
September 21, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Thank you for all your lovely wedding stories everyone!